Body positivity and fat acceptance movement

[Anamarija]

I've been researching this topic for a while now and I was wondering what you guys think about it.

I've seen many videos on TikTok and You Tube where very angry obese people talk about how you shouldn't listen to doctors or go to a diet because that means you're not body positive and you don't accept your body.

I have also come across many videos where obese people (very obese) dance in very scanty clothes and show off their body parts alluding to being considered sexy and desirable (and I didn't see any parental advisory even though some things are explicit).

I would have a problem with that (in the sense that it's not acceptable to me) and if I was looking at a very thin woman who, by some "objective" standards, would be considered sexy.

There's also video where they stuff a bunch of food into themselves to show that they doesn't bother with the quantity or quality of the food they ingests. As some kind of "victory" over the society that discriminates against you?

There's a channel on You Tube by Odins Men [-https://www.youtube.com/@OdinsMen/featured] which has a lot of videos on the subject. I like to watch him because he is a real example, IMO, of a traditional man, in appearance and reactions. And his reactions are really funny.

So, I was puzzled by this two terms, body positivity and fat acceptance. What is the difference?

I found an article [-What Is Fat Acceptance?] on the internet which, IMO, explains these terms well.

Fat acceptance is the recognition that bodies of all shapes and sizes, particularly larger ones, are inherently worthy.

Advocates of this movement work to improve quality of life for fat people and fight discrimination against them in industries such as healthcare, fashion, and employment. Fat acceptance activists have also been described as "fat rights" or "fat liberation" advocates.

The history of fat acceptance dates back decades. Get a better understanding of this movement by reviewing its origins, legal challenges against fat discrimination, and the barriers fat people continue to face today.

Defining Fat Acceptance​

An outgrowth of the political movements of the 1960s, fat acceptance is a form of activism that exposes and challenges the barriers fat people face in society.

National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance​

Regarding fat acceptance, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) states, “We envision a culture where all fat people are free, celebrated, and liberated from every form of oppression."

Just as people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, low-income people, and individuals with disabilities face institutional discrimination, so do fat people. In fact, it’s not uncommon for fat people who belong to these marginalized groups to experience overlapping forms of discrimination. NAAFA works to protect the rights of fat people, also called “people of size.”

Although fat acceptance is often used synonymously with terms such as "body positivity", it is not the same. The political roots of the movement distinguish it from the body positivity movement, which does not explicitly fight against anti-fat bias in society.

• The body positivity movement strives to empower people to value and appreciate their bodies, but this includes bodies of all weights as well as concerns such as scars, cellulite, stretch marks, facial features, and height. Such characteristics are not necessarily linked to fatness.
• Moreover, body positivity has been overtly commercialized by fashion and beauty brands, with the hashtag #bopo often used on social media to reference the movement.
• In contrast, fat acceptance remains primarily a political movement that has seen activists mount legal challenges to combat anti-fat bias.

There's also term "The Fat Underground". On this page [-Life In The Fat Underground by Sara Fishman] it said:

The Fat Underground was active in Los Angeles throughout the decade of the 1970s. Feminist in perspective, it asserted that American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women, particularly their sensuality and their sexuality. The Fat Underground employed slashing rhetoric: Doctors are the enemy. Weight loss is genocide. Friends in the mainstream-sympathetic academics and others in the early fat rights movement-urged them to tone it down, but ultimately came to adopt much of the Fat Underground's underlying logic as their own.

Radical means "root." Radical liberation movements rarely try to change discriminatory laws. Rather, they demand change at the level of fundamental social values, which are seen as the root cause of all human laws. These values not only shape legislation, they also affect the way people view one another and treat one another in day-to-day interactions. These values influence the individual's self-image, fostering self-hating attitudes and self-defeating behaviors in members of groups that society considers "inferior." This insight was the driving force behind the Radical Therapy movement, a major precursor to the Fat Underground. Radical Therapy developed in the early 1970s as an in-your-face rebuke to the mainstream mental health profession. Conventional psychotherapy places the burden of change on the "maladjusted" individual; radical therapists condemned this as a "blame-the-victim" approach. "Change society, not ourselves," they urged. Practitioners of Radical Therapy (or Radical Psychiatry, as some called it) prided themselves on having no professional credentials. The "problem-solving groups" wherein they conducted therapy were also training grounds for social activism.

I must admit, before I posted this post I was reluctant to that, because it could be offensive for some people, right? But there's so many things that could be offensive to someone.

The way I see it, there is discrimination toward obese people, but there's also discrimination toward many others categories of people. Even toward white people. I remember last year that I saw black woman teaching white people how is wrong their supremacy

.

And this discrimination is one of the lesson that we have to learn to deal with it. Being angry just adds the fuel on everything.

These are examples of the way this people think (they are from Twitter but I heard them in one show on the You Tube):

Slim women must accept that their existence is shaming larger women. By being slim you are harming others. #FatAcceptance #Feminism

The term „obese“ is a slur because it is used to dehumanize us and harass us. It's not because our feelings are hurt by an 'accurate description', it is an outdated term that does more harm than good. And as such, it should be eradicted. That's it.

 

[Zzartemis]

It's more crazy making, but it may also be a symptom of what some ppl feel deep down....lots of hostility towards others not like themselves.

There was a time when a sturdier female form was desired. I think it was when marketing advertisers started using 12 year olds to model adult clothing (think Kate Moss) when bodycentric confusion really took off....All this has been contrived.

I knew plenty of normal sized men and women who desired a plus size mate....It was a matter of preference....Just as I preferred a long lean tallish male without bulked up muscles. However, I did date males outside of my preference, based on who they were.

 

[Wandering Star]

You put a colored flag on this and you already have another spider web where many will be trapped.

There are genetic disorders that facilitate obesity, but the people I've known with morbid obesity had a horrible diet with huge amounts of processed foods and sugars, plus unlimited gluttony.

 

[mkrnhr]

Discrimination against people because of their body shape is wrong and idiotic. However, the idea that morbid obesity is not a health hazard and that it is to be encouraged is lunacy. Some people have psychological and emotional problems and instead of helping them help themselves, these movements make a mockery out of the suffering.

 

[Honzap]

Well, we are molded and wired differently so the discrimination towards more fat/less fat is simply stupid.
Sometimes it makes me think the idea was cleverly inserted in just to stir emotions and to divide society.

Take fashion trends. Who sets them anyway? Twiggy, naturally slim on one side and compare to one of the influencers with surgically added fat tissue on their butt. Go few centuries down the past to Tizian`s time and you`ll see a lot of curves.

Anyway, as long as you can take care of yourself and like how you look, don`t let anybody else tell you otherwise. If not, get off your butt and do something

 

[Maya]

Discrimination against people because of their body shape is wrong and idiotic. However, the idea that morbid obesity is not a health hazard and that it is to be encouraged is lunacy. Some people have psychological and emotional problems and instead of helping them help themselves, these movements make a mockery out of the suffering.

Funny thing, few days ago my doughter showed me this video because it's hot topic among teenagers at the moment as well.
Luckily I think most kids still realize this is unhealthy extreme promoted for destruction of sane, healthy individuals
and societies road to hell

 

[seek10]

I consider this issue as part of the battle over mind that was going on for some time( or forever). In this age of internet, information can't be blocked totally, but people can be overwhelmed, coopted using real or manufactured emotions of the people. We have seen many forms of it - color (white/black/mixed), race, religion ( Muslims once terrorists, now victims), aggressor vs victim ( body sizes, black/white, past aggressions) , gender (original feminine movement that transformed to LGBT), and so on.

so, it is matter of what combinations work on whom, rather than the individual issue itself. We have the media that promote it for the purposes which itself has no clue except its own sponsors wants them to. We already seen how people reacted to Covid nonsense and the end result is coopting the free will.

 

[Anamarija]

I consider this issue as part of the battle over mind that was going on for some time( or forever). In this age of internet, information can't be blocked totally, but people can be overwhelmed, coopted using real or manufactured emotions of the people. We have seen many forms of it - color (white/black/mixed), race, religion ( Muslims once terrorists, now victims), aggressor vs victim ( body sizes, black/white, past aggressions) , gender (original feminine movement that transformed to LGBT), and so on.

Beautiful said.
Somehow I sympathize with those people because each one of us has our own fights, illusions that we have (if we want to) to break it down. And that's not easy. You have to collect a lot of information, experiment with implementation in your own life, changing your mindset, perspectives. It's great when you have a community like we do. It's so much easier. But when I think of someone with that problem, especially the ones that are angry at society they are in deep trouble.

And some of them even said once you enter in "fat community" you will get even bigger discrimination if you decided to solve your health issues or try to loose weight. Because, according to fat community, it means that you are not body positive. That remains me of vegans who behave the same. If you remember cases when vegan (Sott.net write about it) decided to stop being vegan and then they experienced a terrible judgment by vegans.

It looks to me that world is divided in some small communities which function as a cult. Maybe I'm exaggerating.

I remember that before I didn't feel comfortable in my body if I get some weight (that I thought is too much) till the point we discovered Behe and Intelligent Design. Now I eat (usually) only one meal daily, btw. my cats eat more than I do . Three times and little bit of cookies for brunch. But it's not that I'm on diet, I just realize that is enough for my body. If i eat more than what my machine is comfortable with I have an acid problem or i just don't feel well. Especially if I eat after 6 p.m. But I didn't come to this point just like that. There's lot that you have to change in your way of thinking and that is not just about food and body.

I was just thinking how this problem with obesity and all this woke nonsense could be so powerful tool to keep someone at the 'bottom'.

 

[BlueKiwi]

here's also discrimination toward many others categories of people. Even toward white people

Not trying to sidetrack this thread, but that video title makes me giggle, which is itself the very definition of racism.

Personally though, I think this "fat acceptance movement" is just another variation of the continued abridgement of free will - Trying to forcing everyone to assimilate their beliefs, words, phrases and thinking etc.

It is also wishful thinking of these people to make themselves believe they are healthy. Granted there are medical / genetic conditions which may make people obese.

 

[hlat]

Slim women must accept that their existence is shaming larger women. By being slim you are harming others.

Yet another pathological attack on normal people.

 

[BlueKiwi]

Yet another pathological attack on normal people.

Exactly. It's this exact kind of "victimhood" they are attempting to apply to society. If they make statements such as this, they need to consider the opposite.

How would they feel about "slim" women pushing statements like this, maybe in a "slim acceptance" campaign :

Larger women must accept that their existence is shaming slimmer women. By being large you are harming others.

How silly does that sound ?

I accept anyone for who they are - but I reject their forcing of their beliefs upon us, so they can somehow, hopefully in the future, when they (wishfully) think everyone will be thinking what they want others to think, maybe feel comfortable with themselves.

 

[Glenn]

I kind of see that the effect of all the bad policies by government, (where at the crux is victim hood of one sort or another), and the relentless pushing of these narratives by the media, is that when it falls on unstable minds, it acts as sort of an 'activation'. And what can be activated will depend on the individual.

Minds and bodies have been subjected to all sorts of toxins and poisons in our foods, and relentless programming since birth from just about any source you can name.

It seems into this scenario has been introduced these narratives, like transgender, racism, etc, and in this case, fat shaming. People that buy into these narratives unwittingly fall into the trap set for them, and there is not much you can do about it. At least, not much that I can see...

 

[Andrian]

I think that the above subject is yet another example of the distorted mode of thinking of the snowflakey woke crowd trying to force everyone else through the help of the PTB and their minions to push forward a distorted version of reality and a distorted and pathological way of living.

In the last few years we've seen similar attempts of distortion of reality by the PTB through the woke mob, through the push of the critical race theory, queer theory, being fat is good, exercising is bad...

It's madness, a sign of disintegration at least of a part of the population, that is, of those people that cave in to the lies and the ponerized influence of the pathological individuals in high and influential positions of power.

The following 2 videos by JP are an example of how the distortion of reality relating to a healthy lifestyle is being pushed forward by the PTB:

 

[T.C.]

I think that the above subject is yet another example of the distorted mode of thinking of the snowflakey woke crowd trying to force everyone else through the help of the PTB and their minions to push forward a distorted version of reality and a distorted and pathological way of living.

Another aspect has been discussed elsewhere, I think here on the forum or maybe Laura wrote about it somewhere.

That achieving things in life takes hard work, for most people anyway. If you are naturally fatter than others, then even dieting and exercising for superficial reasons takes effort. But there are people who are naturally thin. This creates resentment: “Why should I have to work hard to achieve what someone else just has naturally?” There, the victim mentality enters and the attitude that those who are naturally thin are oppressors. So that’s where the attitude is born that I’m going to flaunt may fatness, and create/join the cultural movement that glorifies it.

I’m sure Laura’s point (though I could be misremembering) was about beauty with regards to attracting a male. That in the past, women who weren’t naturally attractive would have to develop their mind and talents and skills and abilities, to make a success of themselves in other ways, in order to attract a partner. Instead, nowadays, you dye your hair blue and scream at the sky and say woke things.

 

[Zzartemis]

That I’m the past, women who weren’t naturally attractive would have to develop their mind and talents and skills and abilities, to make a success of themselves in other ways, in order to attract a partner.

I was naturally thin, with big breasts and slim hips...it got me more attention than what I wanted at times...lots of negative attraction from other women, which was horribly unfair.

Regarding Laura's statement above, I got to telling young women, who thought they could ride out their lives on the coat tails of beauty, "Beauty fades, but dumb's forever."